Pauline Liu: Albany hearing set for Data Dashboard plan

Monday

Nov 18, 2013 at 2:00 AMNov 18, 2013 at 9:27 AM

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently suffered a bout of foot-in-mouth disease. On Friday, he spoke to a group of school superintendents in Richmond, Va., about the growing opposition to Common Core State Standards for math and English, which were adopted in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

Pauline Liu

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently suffered a bout of foot-in-mouth disease. On Friday, he spoke to a group of school superintendents in Richmond, Va., about the growing opposition to Common Core State Standards for math and English, which were adopted in 45 states and the District of Columbia.

He said that some of the opposition came from "white suburban moms who all of a sudden (realized) their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

Really, Arnie?

His off-the-cuff remark set off a firestorm on Twitter. Educators took to social media over the weekend to rant about the education czar's flippancy.

The fact that Duncan needs to take his show on the road and explain the Common Core curriculum to the education community means that it's in trouble. If the event was intended as a public relations event of sorts, it went awry.

Meanwhile, here in the Empire State, get ready for the battle over student privacy to get even hotter.

Last week, a group of New York City parents were so concerned about this subject that they've filed suit against State Education Commissioner John King Jr. and the Board of Regents in hopes of heading off the state's new data portal.

It's set to launch this winter on the State Education Department's EngageNY website.

The portal is known as the Data Dashboard, and parents aren't the only ones who are raising questions about the dashboard.

More than 40 school districts have decided to opt out of the Race to the Top federal competitive grant program and return any unspent grant money, rather than participate in the dashboard, according to the nonprofit group Class Size Matters.

And last week, the Middletown school board passed a resolution authorizing its lawyers to take legal action to prevent the State Education Department from allowing student data to be encrypted and stored by the nonprofit organization inBloom.

Now, state lawmakers are weighing in, as well.

The Assembly Standing Committee on Education will be holding a public hearing about the disclosure of personally identifiable student information to inBloom.

The hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Wednesday in Hearing Room B of the Legislative Office Building in Albany.

State education officials have told districts and parents that they don't have a choice in the matter; the state is planning to upload the information regardless.